San Diego museum shows off Mogul jewels in the crown

You don`t need to know the history of Hindu gods or the Mogul emperors to be thoroughly entranced by South Asian paintings. These pictures seduce the eyes with their dazzling attention to detail, their beautifully drawn forms, their collar-grabbing use of color and their elastic sense of space.

Few museums in the United States or Europe have collections that illustrate the glories of painting from India and neighboring lands as well as the San Diego Museum of Art. Now, the first big exhibition in nearly a decade featuring the Edwin Binney 3rd Collection, "Power & Desire," is on view.

Unlike the last major display, the equally compelling "Myths, Monsters, Maharajas," this one will tour - to New York and then Sydney. The presence of the Binney Collection in other cities will underscore an important shift in direction for the museum: Director Don Bacigalupi, still relatively new to the job, is placing renewed emphasis on its permanent collection.

A selection of 70-plus pictures, drawn from the more than 1,450 in the Binney holdings, is elegantly organized into three sections. One portion looks at romance, love and relationships; the second, at gods such as Krishna, Rama and Shiva, and their complex relationships to mortals; and the third, at court life of the emperors, with its elaborate rituals and activities.

This array of subjects, all by itself, should signal any viewer that South Asian art is ambitious in scope, able to create an impressive portrait of life - at least life as the powerful and the privileged lived it between 1500 and 1900. A trio of curators - Caron Smith of the San Diego Museum of Art, Vishakha N. Desai of New York`s Asia Society and Kavita Singh of Marg Publications - strive to show us just how ambitious.

The show means to be friendly to the novice. It genuinely is. Wall text explains the various kingdoms of the region and the artistic traditions they spawned. It also illuminates the gods, court life and courtship in clear, concise prose.

Most individual works get their own succinct paragraph or two in accompanying panels. The tools and methods of the South Asian artist are part of the show, including delicate brushes and pigment, along with the sort of display of fruit, flowers and statuary that exemplify "puja," the ritualistic means of demonstrating devotion to a god in the Hindu mode.

Some moments in the art itself transcend any need for explanation. No one needs to read about the tender embrace in "A Lover Offers His Mistress Wine Beneath a Flowering Tree" to know that romance was just as special in 18th century India as it is now.

Nature is in bloom and so is their love. The theme is simple, but the picture is visually ornate. Each blossom on the tree is executed down to minute details. Sky is brilliantly colored. Pattern is everywhere on their clothes and skin. (Scholars make an educated guess that Mir Kalan Khan is the artist in this instance, but most works on view remain uncredited.)

Other paintings need an historical gloss. Female figures, sharing wine, a smoke and conversation in a painting from the south central plateau of Decca - a Muslim portion of what is now India - are part of a harem. Their husband is absent in the brightly colored "Eight women and a child on a palace terrace in the women`s quarters" (circa. 1760).

In Hindu scripture and Hindu-inspired art, gods didn`t set themselves apart from mortals. Krishna is a human face of god - a charming, lighthearted and erotic one - who pursues the beautiful Radha in poetry and picture. He shows his devotion to her by washing her feet - a moment that is crisply depicted in a composition also dating from around 1760.

Narrative concision is an ingenious element of South Asian painting and in the lushly painted "A friend tells Krishna of Radha`s pitiful condition" (circa 1820), the artist compresses two events from a 12th century poem, "Gita Govinda," into one image. In action that precedes the picture, Radha, jealous of his other lovers, has given Krishna the brushoff.

In the painting, it`s as if we`re looking at a two-frame comic strip, each panel separated by surrounding groves rather than framing lines. In one, the confidante implores Radha to reconcile with Krishna; in the other, she explains Radha`s feelings to the god. In the poem, he comes to appreciate her intense love for him.

Here, as elsewhere, you know when Krishna is in a picture. He`s color-coded for recognition: His skin is blue. The fluid state of relationships between gods and humans was a way of expressing the desire for a fusion of the senses and the spirit. The two are clearly less segregated than in the Western tradition. LIVING HISTORY

These artists worked for the court, just as European artists worked for state and church during the same centuries. It`s an accurate mirror of the age that the majority of works in the exhibition are from the Mogul court, which supported the arts in grand fashion as a means of celebrating its own imperial grandeur and domination of the region.

Royal life, in all its variety, endures in this art. And because the work is so compelling, these images are the monuments to the emperors and their way of life that they surely hoped for.

Gift-giving is a favored subject. It gets sophisticated pictorial treatment in "Celebration of Shah Jahan`s 46th solar birthday," calculated to have been completed on Jan. 16, 1640. The artist Abid, also known as the son of Aqa Rez, manages to make each of the sons of the emperor, each noble and each entertainer distinct and still blend them part of a crowd. All stand; only the emperor (the ruler who built the Taj Mahal) is allowed to sit. His intricately rendered peacock throne signifies his vast wealth.

As the curators inform us, a senior artist such as Abid might only do the drawing. Then others in the royal atelier would apply the color, which in pre-19th century pictures came from sources as varied as the juices of insects (red), flowers or the urine of cows fed on mango (yellow) and lapislazuli (blue).

Color can be fantastical, particularly when it comes to the divine realm. But then so is the imagery. The green-skinned creature in "Lakshmi-Narayana flying through the night sky" (circa 1760) is half-man and half-bird. The moment is just as fanciful and mythological as the creature that dominates the scene: As Garuda carries a pair of gods through the sky, other unseen deities shower them with roses and jasmine.

Some of the magic of this art resides in its size. One marvels that these artists could create the world and the cosmos on such a small scale. These pictures look just as wonderful under magnifying glasses available in the museum`s galleries. At times, even more so. ART REVIEW

"Power and Desire: South Asian Paintings From the San Diego Museum of Art, Edwin Binney 3rd Collection," paintings from the 16th through the 19th centuries.

Through July 30; San Diego Museum of Art, the Prado, Balboa Park. $8; $6, seniors, young adults (18-24), military and students; $3, young people (6-17). (619) 232-7931.

(c)Copley News Service

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Author: Robert L. Pincus